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The Afghanistan Conflict, International Terrorism and the Us Response*

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The Afghanistan Conflict, International Terrorism and the Us Response* THE AFGHANISTAN CONFLICT, INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM AND THE US RESPONSE* AMIN SAIKAL Amin Saikal is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (the Middle East and Central Asia) at the Australian National University. * Opinions expressed in this paper are author’s personal views only. The crisis of international terrorism emanating from Afghanistan might have been avoided had Washington heeded the now-slain leader of the Afghan anti-Taliban forces, the legendary commander Ahmad Shah Masood, who repeatedly warned that a dangerous triangular alliance between the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and Pakistan was turning Afghanistan into a major source of instability in world politics. Washington’s failure to help Masood to limit the menace eventually cost both the commander and the US dearly. Masood died on 15 September 2001 of wounds inflicted on him in a suicide bombing by two Arabs, apparently organised by bin Laden, only two days before the US fell victim to the apocalyptic terrorist attacks on 11 September. Why did the US fail to act earlier over Afghanistan, and is it now capable of addressing effectively the root-causes of the present crisis? The axis of Osama bin Laden, Taliban and Pakistan (or more specifically Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence Directorate (ISI), which operated as a government within a government) was not an over-night development. It dated from mid-1994 when Pakistan orchestrated the extremist Taliban militia, made up of mostly ethnic Pashtuns from both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, as the most appropriate geo-political force to secure a compliant government in Kabul. This followed a very turbulent and devastating decade and a half in Afghan politics. A pro-Soviet communist coup in 1978 brought to an abrupt end the longest period of peace and stability in modern Afghan history, from 1930 to 1978, during which time the ethno-tribally divided Afghans had managed to create an unprecedented degree of national cohesion and stable political order. The failure of the communists, who were very small in number, highly factionalised and lacked historical legitimacy, administrative experience and popular appeal, opened the way for the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. This in turn led to an American-sponsored counter-interventionist strategy, implemented through Pakistan as the ‘frontline state’, in support of the Afghan Islamic resistance forces (the Mujahidin). The Soviets were forced to leave Afghanistan by the end of the 1980s. The USSR disintegrated shortly thereafter, and the Soviet protégé regime collapsed in Kabul in April 1992. The United States consequently ended its involvement in Afghanistan with no due consideration to the post-communist management of the Afghan conflict. The conflict left Afghanistan in tatters, with the country’s political, administrative, security and economic structures in ruins, making Afghanistan terribly vulnerable to its neighbours’ post- Cold War pursuit of conflicting regional interests. Pakistan proved to be the most predatory: it tried to assume the US role to achieve certain regional ambitions, most importantly, ‘strategic depth’ in Afghanistan against its archenemy, India. The moderate Mujahidin Islamic government that took over Kabul under President Burhanuddin Rabbani, with Ahmad Shah Masood as its powerful commander, could not rapidly consolidate power. Pakistan vehemently opposed Masood’s independent stance and was angered by his refusal to compromise Afghanistan’s independence in support of 1 Islamabad’s regional interests. When Islamabad failed in its efforts to put its protégé, the maverick Pashtun Mujahidin leader and self-styled Islamist, Gulbuddin Hikymatyar, in a position to head the government, the ISI decided on a daring course of action. It capitalised on its close friendship with the CIA from the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan for support in generating a fresh and extremist Sunni Islamic fighting force, which could be seen as occupying higher moral ground than the Rabbani government. That force was the Taliban, which burst onto the Afghan scene with the full human, military and logistic aid of Pakistan, and financial backing of two US allies, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The latter states offered support for two reasons: their Sunni Islamic sectarian affiliation with Pakistan, and their desire to secure some anti-Iranian leverage in Afghanistan, especially in relation to the Iran-UAE territorial dispute over the islands of the Greater and Smaller Tunbs, and Abu Musa in the Gulf. The CIA and for that matter the US government quietly endorsed the Taliban development in an apparent attempt to let Pakistan fill the vacuum to which Washington’s neglect of post-communist Afghanistan had contributed. The US government also showed no qualms over bin Laden’s move into Afghanistan in 1996. Bin Laden threw the weight of his wealth and Arab connections behind the Taliban, although by now he was no stranger to American security agencies. He was one of the hundreds of Arab volunteers who, with CIA and ISI support, had joined the Mujahidin to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. He was also already known for his stand against the United States. He had denounced America’s protection of what he had called “the corrupt Saudi regime”, and its domination of the Middle East. He had condemned America’s strategic alliance with Israel and Israel’s forcible occupation of Palestinian land, most importantly East Jerusalem (containing Islam’s third holiest place after Mecca and Medina). The deployment of US troops in Saudi Arabia – the holiest soil of Islam – to reverse the August 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait had marked a turning point in the growth of his anti-American convictions and his desire for revenge. Washington seemed to view the Taliban as beneficial to its interests. The militia’s anti-Iranian character and its purported ability to secure a direct corridor through Afghanistan into the newly independent but resource-rich former Soviet Central Asian Muslim republics appeared appealing. Just in the same way as Washington had failed to see the consequences of disengagement from Afghanistan after achieving its prime goal of defeating Soviet communism, it paid little or no attention to the long-term consequences of these new developments. Even when it became fully apparent after the Taliban take over of Kabul in mid-1996 and Masood and his supporters’ bitter complaint that an ugly and disturbing alliance was developing between extremist Arab and non-Arab groups in Afghanistan, Washington remained conspicuously silent. It tacitly, if not actively, endorsed various American companies participating in projects that could allow them to access the energy resources of Central Asia through Afghanistan. The one consortium that attracted widespread attention because of its favourable disposition towards the Taliban was led by UNOCAL of the US and Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia, whose proposed project was to construct a $2.5 billion pipeline across Afghanistan to export gas from Turkmenistan to South Asia. Washington’s concern was to deny Iran a role as an alternative route. Meanwhile, Washington paid no more than lip service to the international outcry over what increasingly turned out to be the Taliban’s brutal, medievalist rule, and their application of a highly discriminatory, extremist form of Sunni Islam, which had no historical precedent in Afghanistan. It offered only occasional verbal criticism of the Taliban, such as that by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at the end of 1997. Albright drew attention to the 2 institution of a theocratic reign of terror, involving massive human rights violations, especially against girls and women, who were even barred from receiving education and employment, and against the Shiahs who make up 15 percent of Afghanistan’s population. Similarly, the Washington remained somewhat muted over an increasing number of reports that the Taliban were transforming Afghanistan into a major source of poppy growing, heroin production and drug trafficking, from the proceeds of which they partly financed their relentless war against the opposition. In fact, the Taliban produced two-thirds of the world’s heroin in 1999. Washington generally sidelined reports about ISI-driven Taliban training of Arab and Kashmiri militants to fight US hegemony in the Muslim world and India’s control of Jammu and Kashmir. It persistently failed to declare as unacceptable Taliban-bin Laden extremism and Pakistan’s support for it, and did not provide the Masood-led armed opposition with the necessary help to combat a complete Pakistani-Taliban-bin Laden take over of Afghanistan. Had it not been for bin Laden’s alleged masterminding of the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania at the cost of hundreds of casualties in August 1998, Washington would likely have been quite content to remain disengaged from developments in Afghanistan; it showed little concern over Pakistan’s handling of them. However, the embassy bombings changed the situation dramatically. They brought the chickens home to roost for both the United States and Saudi Arabia, and indeed jolted Washington out of its slumber. Washington finally viewed the developments in Afghanistan as damaging and found it imperative to act. In the first instance, the Clinton administration promptly launched two cruise missile attacks – one on what the US described as a bin Laden-linked chemical weapons factory in Sudan, and another on bin Laden’s training camps in eastern Afghanistan. The first target turned out to be a medicine factory with no proven linkage to bin Laden; the second missed bin Laden and his top brass. If anything, the US actions raised bin Laden’s profile, enabling him to project himself more effectively than ever as the defender of Arab and Islamic causes to a wider audience in the Muslim world. Of the 24 people killed in the missile attack on Afghanistan, several were Kashmiri trainees, which clearly established the growing bonds between bin Laden, the Taliban and Kashmiri militants.
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